by Thomas Beutel

I was helping a friend install a new Brother HL-L2340DW laser printer today and I had a heck of a time getting the WIFI to work on it. All the Macs and my iPhone could see the wireless network just fine, but the printer and a Windows 7 laptop just didn’t see it, even though […]

I recently created a form where one of the questions was asking for a specific code (specifically, a NAICS code). The problem was that there are almost 20,000 codes to choose from, so it was not practical to use a pulldown. I hit upon the idea of using the wonderful Datatables table plugin for jQuery. […]

I had an old Fedora 8 server running legacy code that I needed to patch for the Shellshock Bash bug. I proved that bash was vunerable by running this command: env X=”() { :; } ; echo busted” /bin/bash -c “echo stuff” I saw the word “busted” in the output, meaning I needed to upgrade […]

I get about 3000 emails a month (a lot of them are server notifications if you are wondering) and I like to keep all my email because I do frequently refer to older emails. I think of my emails as a database that I can search for conversations, attachments and personal history. Gmail is a […]

I needed a quick way to check for XML well-formedness in a Perl Nagios script and I found that Test::XML has a test called is_well_formed_xml($xml) that does the job nicely. The only problem was that as part of the Test::More framework, Test::XML outputs test results (as it should). In my case though, I just wanted […]

I recently updated a client’s WordPress to 3.9.2. There was a page on that WordPress that served as the PayPal notify_url and it had been working fine up until I updated. The page simply used a shortcode that I created in the functions.php file to process the incoming PayPal parameters. After the update, what I […]

Mike Oskin (@mikeoskin) from U.C. Davis tweeted on late Sunday that PhD students Alex Morelan and Chad Trexler had gone out in the field in the Napa area and mapped several surface ruptures related to the South Napa earthquake of Aug 24, 2014. Additional tweets showed pictures of the ruptures. 16 km of rupture, max […]

I monitor a number of servers using nagios and I always thought it would be neat to be able to have some sort of ambient device light up when there was a critical problem. Yes, I get email and text alerts, and nagios is always up in one tab on my browser, but I wanted […]

Every so often I have the opportunity to help a friend with a seemingly intractable computer problem. More often than not, the problem is not really a problem at all, it is just plain awful design. Case in point: My friend was using Safari and this appeared every time he wanted to access his email. […]

I struggled a long time trying to figure out why my nginz + php-fpm setup was not working. I could tell that the gateway was fine and I was getting a HTTP 200 OK response, but the output was blank and there were no illuminating entries in either the nginx or php-fpm logs. After a […]